Laravel order user by role

Question

I have table users and pivot table role_user, not every user has a role. I need to make a query and get all users, and order them by roles, which join statement should I use then, how would that query look like then? I need some similar query to this, but so that users with that have roles come first and not the ones that don't have roles like now:

$users = DB::table('users')
                     ->leftJoin('role_user', 'users.id', '=', 'role_user.user_id')
                     ->orderBy('role_id')
                     ->get();

Answer 1

The following code should do the trick:

$users = DB::table('users')
  ->leftJoin('role_user', 'users.id', '=', 'role_user.user_id')
  ->orderBy(\DB::raw('role_id IS NULL'))
  ->orderBy('role_id')
  ->get();

This way you'll first sort by role_id IS NULL , that will be 0 if user has role_id set and 1 if user has no role, so users with role set will go first. Then within each group users will be ordered by role_id .